Blogger.com emailed an apology to users on Saturday when access was restored.

The company said it was looking at extra monitoring and process checks to stop the mistake happening again.

One irate blogger said: "Google lost my trust yesterday. They'll have to work twice as hard to regain it due to their lack of acknowledgment of the problem."

Figures from Alexa.com found Blogger suffered more downtime in 2007 than any other Top 20 website.

We want to offer our sincerest apologies to affected bloggers and their readers. We've tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam. We are adding additional monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data.

"She enjoyed the notoriety -- it kept her mind fresh," her great-grandson Darren Stone of Brisbane told local newspapers.

"She had people communicating with her from as far away as Russia and America on a continual basis, not just once in a while."

Riley had posted more than 70 entries on her blog -- or "her blob" as she jokingly called it -- since February last year. She set up the site with the help of a friend who entered her posts for her.

In her last and 74th post (http://worldsoldestblogger.blogspot.com) on June 26 she spoke of moving into a nursing home and of her ill health, saying: "I still feel weak and can't shake off that bad cough."

This afternoon, many blogs showed the error bX-uxu3fu for about two hours. This was caused by a bug in our latest release that affected highly-customized Layouts templates. We noticed the problem as soon as the release finished deploying, and worked quickly to find and fix the bug.

We apologize to the bloggers and readers of the affected blogs.

And let this be another lesson in the fine uses of Twitter. I wrote a tweet a couple of hours ago to let people know Blogger was down but I could not write about it for obvious reasons, and Duncan Riley of TechCrunch picked it up, wrote a post, and within 30 minutes everything was fixed. Nice teamwork.

As online food sites become increasingly influential in the restaurant business, chefs and owners are plying bloggers with free meals to get good write-ups. Some are also posting favorable reviews about themselves on popular Web sites or becoming Internet scribes.

Among those using the tactics are some of the biggest names in the business. Terrance Brennan, co-owner and chef of New York's Artisanal Bistro and Picholine, hosted a cheese class for bloggers last year, waiving the usual $75-a-person fee. Bill Telepan, chef and co-owner of Telepan in New York, donated a $200, four-course meal to one influential blogger's online contest. And in Washington, the Park Hyatt's Blue Duck Tavern says it invited a customer back for a free Father's Day meal after she posted a negative comment on the Washington Post's Web site. (In a follow-up post, the diner wrote, "We will definitely return to Blue Duck Tavern," not mentioning that she had been invited free.)

Chefs say there's another upside to getting chummy with bloggers: advice on improving the food. In San Francisco, Chef Robbie Lewis of Bacar restaurant says he considers Ms. Gagliardi, of Tablehopper, "a friend" at this point. After hosting her at a "friends and family dinner" -- a meal to try out new dishes on close associates about a month after starting as the executive chef at the restaurant -- Mr. Lewis took her advice. He changed the way he plated a roasted baby leek dish, so it was easier for diners to get a taste of poached egg and sauce with each bite.

"I can't get feedback from other critics before publication," says Mr. Lewis. Ms. Gagliardi didn't write a subsequent review, but frequently mentions events at Bacar on her site.

It's relatively easy for restaurants to ingratiate themselves to key food bloggers. Publicists across the industry say they now include bloggers and food Web site forum hosts on their media lists, and regularly invite them to opening parties, free meals and other events.

What I was told, in a nutshell, is that the café staff has encountered a stream of would-be critics "with attitude," predisposed to take issue with or be critical of the business. Whether or not this is a correct perception, there are many more outlets (Yelp being only one) for customers and consumers to voice opinions about businesses on the Internet. And there's little most of these businesses can do about it, for better or for worse.

The staff said to me rhetorically, "If you've got a problem with something, you should tell us first rather than going online and posting." They also expressed the view that amateur reviewers, in this case from Yelp, were not making distinctions between local coffee houses and large corporate outlets like Starbucks. They were, the cafe staff argued, being "snarky" for entertainment reasons or to impress the Yelp community but not being respectful or mindful of the potential impact their reviews might have on a small businesses.

Security researcher Alex Eckelberry from Sunbelt Software first noticed the booby-trapped links turning up on Blogger on 27 August.

Now many hundreds of blogs on the site have been updated with a short entry containing the link.

Mr Eckelberry said it was not yet clear how the links were posted to blogs. The bogus entries could have exploited a Blogger feature that lets users e-mail entries to their journal.

The blogs themselves could also be fake and set up solely to act as hosts for spam.

Today we are releasing video uploading to Blogger! This feature allows you to upload videos and create a video podcast with the same ease that we currently provide with photo uploading.

When you go to the Blogger post editor, you'll see a new button () next to the image uploading one. Just select a video from your computer, wait a few minutes for the upload and processing to occur, and voila! Now when you visit your blog, you will see something like this (of course without Tomo, the Blogger Akita):

iStockphoto pioneered the concept of micropayment stock imagery and was one of the first social networks in the world to actually pay contributors for the sale of their work. It remains the world leader in micropayment stock and is now the global volume leader in all stock photography sales, whether user-generated or traditional. iStock has more than 1.8 million members and an image or video is downloaded from the site every 2.5 seconds.

"Lise is a great friend, a true artist, and has really set the bar high for the members of our community," said Bruce Livingstone, CEO of iStockphoto. "We work very hard to promote our artists, providing training, business cards, partnerships, and advertising that give all our exclusive contributors maximum worldwide exposure. I believe Lise is the first of many who will achieve this milestone, as we have just barely scratched the surface of the worldwide appetite for imagery. What may be her most astounding accomplishment is that by our calculations, she just may be the most prolific stock photographer on the planet."

iStock artists are paid instantly every time one of their images is downloaded. Exclusive photographers can make 40 percent royalties on each image sold, and 50 percent on extended license agreements. iStock promotes its collection and photographers through aggressive marketing and advertising campaigns worldwide, and has many partnerships internationally that increase channel sales potential for its artists.

In recognition of her achievement, iStock is creating an iStock Wall of Fame, with Lise the first member inducted. She'll be joined by many more of the artists she has inspired during her meteoric rise.

"I love the community aspects of iStock so much and have learned a great deal from all my friends there since 2003," said Lise Gagne. "I fell in love with iStock right away, but never would have dreamt that someday it would be my career. But things have a way of working out: I got fired from my old design agency for spending too much time on iStock, and suddenly found myself with all the time in the world to give to photography. Now I hope to hit a million downloads in half the time it took to reach 500,000."

Most self-employed bloggers take in between $2,000 and $10,000 a month from ad sales, says Henry Copeland, founder of BlogAds.com, a Web advertising concern based in Carrboro, N.C. The few that have huge audiences make significantly more, he adds. During election time, for example, a political blogger can bring in $20,000 to $30,000 a month, says Ken Layne, West Coast bureau chief for Wonkette.com, a political gossip blog owned by Gawker Media.

Self-employed bloggers set their own schedules. Writers of breaking-news blogs say 40- to 60-hour workweeks are the norm. To scoop his competitors, Mario Lavandeira, author of the celebrity-gossip blog PerezHilton.com, says he averages 19-hour workdays that start at 5:15 a.m.

CAREER PATH: Most bloggers start out using free Web sites such as WordPress.com and Blogger.com. They say it takes at least six months to build readership and clout in the blogosphere. Mr. Lavandeira advises picking an area you'll enjoy discussing for a long time because "you have to be passionate about what you're writing." A background in journalism or communications helps but usually isn't required. "I don't want to hear where candidates went to college or where else they worked," says Ryan Block, managing editor of Engadget.com, who hires most of the site's employees. "I review writing samples."

During an appearance last night on MSNBC, DeLay was asked about the mechanics of writing for his new blog. "Well, I'm not a very good writer," DeLay acknowledged. "I have the ideas, and I have somebody else put the words together." Apparently he still isn't interested in doing research on the Internet.

Still, only three percent of Europe's estimated 130 million Internet users create blogs, it said, adding that most of the bloggers were in France, Italy and Spain.

"France today is still the country that blogs the most, with nearly one million active bloggers," the study said.

The report was based on a survey of 7,377 online consumers in seven countries -- Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.

It found that, unsurprisingly, bloggers tended to be young and first-adopters of new technology -- those for whom any IT innovation is a must-have.

After attracting 11.1 million unique visitors each month to the station's online social network, Skyblog.com, Mr. Bellanger is planning to reach for the skies in January. That is when he intends to spin off new blogs in German, Spanish and English to offer the same rich, raucous mix of the inner thoughts and videos of thousands of young bloggers.

It was a dark and stormy night. The air was quiet. Too quiet. Yet stormy. Suddenly, a beep rang out from a bedside pager. The engineer woke up, grabbing a soda to sharpen his senses. Blogger was down. He needed to bring it back up.

You need to look no further than our status blog or perhaps your own experiences to know that Blogger had a significant number of unplanned outages this last week (forgive me my euphemisms?) and a handful of planned ones to clean up from the unplanned ones. It's been a Murphyesque cavalcade of power failures, fileserver trouble, and wonky network hardware, and I hope you'll believe me when I say that the Blogger staff is even more sick of it than you are.

First up, our apologies. We really regret these outages, which were a nuisance (or worse) to you. The past week's performance was not representative of the kind of service we want to provide for you.

The Internet Society of China has recommended to the government that bloggers be required to use their real names when they register blogs, state media said on Monday, in the latest attempt to regulate free-wheeling Web content.

The society, which is affiliated with the Ministry of Information Industry, said no decision had been made but that a 'real name system' was inevitable.

"A real name system will be an unavoidable choice if China wants to standardise and develop its blog industry," the official Xinhua news agency quoted the Internet Society's secretary general, Huang Chengqing, as saying.

"We suggest, in a recent report submitted to the ministry, that a real name system be implemented in China's blog industry," Huang said.